An Eye Tale

A few days ago I started feeling a slight discomfort in my left eye - it was like there was a foreign body in it. I felt it every time I closed my eye and upon closer inspection, I noticed a tiny dot on the sclera (the white of the eye) and my imaginative mind told me it could be a puncture! Quite how I am supposed to have sustained a puncture wound in my eye didn't matter to my imagination... for all it cares, a stray bit of chalk is capable of it.

It was irritating, but it wasn't itching nor giving me pain, so I thought I'd ignore it. I thought maybe the foreign-body-sensation will go away in a bit. Two days later, however, it was still there. Normally, I wouldn't be hypochondriacal enough to go running to a doctor's - however, I was conveniently going to take my mother to her eye surgeon for a follow-up, after her cataract surgery. At the clinic, after she had hers checked, my mother asked the doctor to have a look at mine, and the good lady doc graciously did.

Turns out, the "puncture wound" is nothing but a mole (which must have recently surfaced) on my eyeball. I know sometimes moles appear (and disappear) as they please on our bodies, but I didn't know it can happen in the eye. Anyhow, the constant irritation aside (doc said nothing needs to be done about it and applying eye-drops will ease the discomfort), I thought it kinda cool to have an eyeball mole. Really. That is, until I start telling people about it, and realise how common this actually is.

To date, I've told two friends. The first replied that he has a mole in his eyeball too. The second replied that her boyfriend has one in his eyeball as well. And no, she doesn't have any moles in any of her eyeballs, but she does have two pupils in her right eye. TWO(2)!

We spent a few minutes during our outing last night checking each other's odd-eyes out... fine, I spent several minutes checking her eye out (I mean, she only needed 2 seconds to spot that tiny, uninteresting mole in mine). Anyway, the lighting wasn't ideal, so I couldn't really see it. This morning however, she sent a photo of her eye in which the two conjoined pupils are quite visible, if not very clearly. This is way beyond cool.

Oh boy, I have a feeling I'd always be paying a lot of attention to her right eye whenever we meet up hereafter...